Unit Record Equipment - Card Punching

Card Punching

For more details on this topic, see IBM 513 Reproducing Punch, IBM 514 Reproducing Punch and IBM 519 Electric Document Originating Machine.

Card punching machines included:

  • Gang punch - these would produce a large number of identically punched cards—for example, for inventory tickets.
  • Reproducing punch - these could reproduce a deck of cards in its entirety or they might just reproduce selected fields. A payroll master deck might be reproduced at the end of a pay period with the hours worked and net pay fields blank and ready for the next pay period's data. Computer programmers who created their programs in the form of punched card decks used these to make backups.
  • Summary punch - these were attached to tabulating machines and could punch new cards with details and totals from the tabulating machine.
  • Mark sense reader - these would detect pencil marks on ovals printed on the card and punch the corresponding data values into the card.

Later "document origination machines" such as the IBM 519 could perform all of the above operations.

The IBM 549 Ticket Converter read data from Kimball tags, copying that data to punched cards.

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